WASHINGTON (CN) — Immigrant advocates wasted no time after the Supreme Court tied the hands of federal judges responding to President Donald Trump’s bid to limit birthright citizenship on Friday, opening a new battlefront against the executive order.

Just hours after the Supreme Court stripped federal court authority to issue universal injunctions, CASA, an immigrants’ rights group involved in the litigation, moved to protect birthright citizenship by certifying U.S.-born children of immigrants as a class.

“Consistent with the Supreme Court’s instructions, plaintiffs have now filed an amended complaint that expressly seeks relief on behalf of a putative class of those U.S.-born babies wrongfully deemed by the Executive Order to be ineligible for U.S. citizenship, along with their parents,” the group wrote in a court filing in Maryland.

The immediate shift from universal injunctions to class actions underscored the remaining paths to challenge Trump’s use of executive authority, but legal experts cautioned that additional roadblocks lie ahead.

“But even with these avenues remaining, the upshot of today’s decision will be that some significant unlawful executive actions will be allowed to remain unchecked, at least as applied to many adversely affected individuals and organizations,” Cary Coglianese, a law and political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, said. “This decision, especially when added to other recent decisions of the court, raises important questions about whether the judiciary will be able to act as a sufficient constraint on unlawful executive power.”

Make Class Actions Great Again

The Supreme Court held that federal judges did not have the authority to issue universal injunctions — judicial orders that apply nationwide — against executive actions. In the challenge to birthright citizenship, those named in the lawsuits — advocacy groups and pregnant mothers — will continue to be protected by the lower courts’ injunctions.

New Jersey and 17 other states, the District of Columbia and San Francisco gained little clarity on their bid for relief, however. The high court declined to decide whether the states could challenge Trump’s order, keeping open whether states could later secure relief for individuals within their borders.

To secure relief across state lines, however, class actions are emerging as the most viable solution.

Professor Brian Wolfman, director of the Appellate Courts Immersion Clinic at Georgetown University, said in an interview with Courthouse News that class actions are the next best avenue to obtain the sort of relief a universal injunction would provide.

“A lot of folks are going to be sitting back and thinking, ‘What are ways of universalizing relief?’” Wolfman said. “An example that everyone naturally thought of, because it’s the example that’s frequently used and has become traditionally used since the middle of the last century, is the class action.”

Class actions are not a simple substitute for universal injunctions. Constitutional Accountability Center Equal Justice Works Fellow Anna Jessurun pointed to additional steps required for relief in these lawsuits. To receive certification, there must be enough members in a class that it would be impossible for everyone to join a single lawsuit. Class members must also have similar legal claims and defenses. 

“It’s just an extra hurdle for plaintiffs seeking to create broad relief that impacts not just the individuals who filed the case, but other similarly situated individuals across the country,” Jessurn said. 

(Un)intended Consequences

Challenges to the administration’s summary deportations under the Alien Enemies Act put the difficulties of class certification on display.

In the first such challenge in Washington, the only migrants to avoid deportation to El Salvador were seven initial plaintiffs, as the administration managed to fly 137 others in the hours between a federal judge’s temporary restraining order and an emergency hearing.

The government ignored an order to turn two midair flights around and has since refused to return 238 migrants still in El Salvador.

For current injunctions granted by federal judges against Trump policies, any fallout from Friday’s decision depends on the current status of the litigation, Wolfman said, such as the orders’ text, whether they’ve been stayed, if they’re before an appellate court and if the relief is still ongoing.

He added that plaintiffs could also seek similar “complete” relief via the Administrative Procedure Act, a statute regularly used by environmental groups to vacate certain agency rules that pose risks to the environment. While such challenges are regularly brought by individual groups or a coalition, the rule’s vacature applies universally, Wolfman said.

All of the alternatives require more of the injured parties, creating a burden for individuals who already lack access to legal resources.

Damon Hewitt, president and executive director for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the decision will limit access to justice in cases where people are facing violations of their constitutional rights.

“In this country, far too many people have no access to our court system because they lack the resources necessary to hire an attorney,” Hewitt said. “And even law firms and nonprofit legal organizations that provide pro bono assistance in complex constitutional cases have done so to make broad impacts that help everyone.”

GOP lawmakers piggyback off Trump’s win 

A vibe shift to class actions was one already forecast on Capitol Hill, where congressional Republicans furious with courts hamstringing the Trump administration’s executive agenda have tried to force such a change legislatively.

California Representative Darrell Issa, who spearheaded a House bill restricting the scope of universal injunctions, told Courthouse News that he had intentionally included a class action carveout in his legislation.

Issa celebrated Friday’s ruling in a post on X.

“The Trump resistance in robes has been exposed by a supermajority of the Supreme Court,” he wrote. “Time for an end to the rogue rulings from activist liberal judges.”

Issa’s measure also included a caveat allowing groups of states to bring their complaints directly to the Supreme Court — provisions the lawmaker argued were “thoughtfully” developed to minimize what Republicans have said is the abuse of nationwide injunctions.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who introduced a similar bill in the Senate, is working to get language paring down universal injunctions included in the GOP’s sweeping budget reconciliation package.

The lawmaker explained in a statement following Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that he’d secured provisions in the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” that would “help the Justice Department fight back against injunctions.”

“I’m heartened to hear a supermajority of the Supreme Court echo what I’ve said repeatedly: judges’ constitutional authority is limited to deciding cases and controversies,” said Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Universal injunctions are an unconstitutional affront to our nation’s system of checks and balances, and ought to be stopped for good.”

Though the Senate parliamentarian has struck down several national injunctions-adjacent provisions Grassley tried to work into the budget reconciliation package, the resolution will still include language allowing the Justice Department to hire additional attorneys to fight injunctions as well as a provision that would force courts to publish statistics on their use of universal injunctions.

The “Big Beautiful Bill,” in its current form, would also establish judicial training programs on what Grassley has called the “lack of legal basis” for universal injunctions.

Still, Democrats warned Friday that the Supreme Court’s ruling represented a dangerous expansion of presidential power.

“By issuing this ruling, the Supreme Court is stating that courts cannot block even the most lawless actions of the Trump administration on a nationwide basis,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries accused the high court of “recklessly” restricting the authority of federal courts.

And while Republicans celebrate Friday’s ruling as a win for the Trump administration, some have pointed out that sidelining nationwide injunctions may come back to bite the GOP under a future administration.

That concern has even come from some Republican lawmakers in recent months. Ohio Representative Mike Turner, the only House Republican to vote against Issa’s nationwide injunctions bill when it passed the House in April, said that his colleagues would come to “regret” the legislation when a Democrat next occupies the White House.

“The judicial system works,” he said at the time. “There is no reason for this bill, which irreversibly takes away individual rights for no reason.”

Lots of talk, few answers 

Much is uncertain about the future of the birthright citizenship cases and other pending lawsuits against executive orders. The Trump administration hasn’t detailed how the order would be enforced, and there are unknowns about how plaintiffs protected by the limited injunction will prove their exemption to officials.

The Supreme Court did not address the legality of Trump’s order limiting birthright citizenship, but legal experts have broadly pronounced it as unconstitutional. If the justices found the order unlawful after Trump was allowed to enforce it for an interim period, it’s unclear what would happen to individuals denied birthright citizenship while the law was enforced.

“That’s just another example of a burden and a hoop and question mark that this case leaves open,” Jessurun said. 

Legal experts suspect the answer will most likely come on a case-by-case basis.